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Why They Mattered

It’s rare that a collection of memorial essays can be both comprehensive and fascinating. We strove for a list that was the latter, and gathered remembrances of some of the most interesting figures in the world of politics and ideas who died this year. For insight into the reach of their influence, we enlisted the help of their friends, their colleagues, their family members and the writers who’ve covered them.

Taken together, the lives and the pursuits of these change-makers cover nearly 100 years of American history. More than half were born before 1930 and all made contributions to the upheavals that defined their age—from segregation to the civil rights movement, the heyday of print journalism to the explosion of the Internet, Vietnam to the war in Afghanistan. They are politicians, journalists, activists and more, remembered here for the things that make them unique—Judy Woodruff on the pioneering journalist Helen Thomas, for instance, Jules Witcover on his writing partner Jack Germond, Lawrence Lessig on the young tech activist Aaron Swartz.

The 17 recalled here—leaders, thinkers and gadflies alike—are bound, we discovered, not just by the fact that they were lost in 2013, but also by the indelible mark they each made on our politics.